Tag: Pensacola

Attractions, Restaurants & Bars, Road Trips, TRAVEL

Tourists in Pensacola

Jane Sadek

MAKING MEMORIES: A SMORGASBOARD OF PENSACOLA

From Historic Downtown Pensacola to the Flora-Bama Bar, my friend made sure I didn’t leave P-Cola without seeing the highlights. She didn’t hide the fact that she’d love to see us multiple times a year, instead of every once in awhile, so she pulled out all the stops.

The Driving Tour

Hunger problem solved, my friend drove us to Downtown Pensacola. They’ve done a great job of preserving the quaintness of the past. Row upon row of restaurants and shops beckoned, but we were just enjoying a drive by.

From there my friend took us to some of the more distinctive neighborhoods and showed us how people live in P-Cola. We got the impression she was interested in having us do more than visit.

Then we got serious about what would be for dinner and she took us to an amazing fish market called Joe Patty’s. What started as a guy selling fresh fish off the dock has turned into an institution dearly loved by P-Colers. Inside there’s a long ice filled counter offering every kind of fish and sea thing you can possibly imagine. Over to the side is a shop with spices of every variety and all kinds of gadgets and souvenirs. The lobster tank towards the back had some of the biggest monsters you can imagine trying to figure out how to climb out of the tank. If you want, they’ll steam your seafood right on the spot and take the work out of it, but my friend is an amazing cook, so we were glad she took the fresh fish home and made us an incredible meal.

The Story of the Flora-Bama

Yea, many long years ago a guy bought a huge piece of land near the border of Florida and Alabama. He had a vision that started with a package store virtually out in the middle of nowhere. That package store is still there and you can pick up some iced down brews to take home, but there’s also the kingdom of Flora-Bama.

The Flora-Bama bar itself is a huge wandering building that had to be created by a drunk carpenter – a carpenter that stayed drunk for decades. There might be a rhyme or reason to it, but it didn’t make much sense to me. There are beachside bars and dune side bars and inside bar and patios and dance floors and stages and who knows what all. There’s one room decorated with abandoned bras hung across crossed lines over the bar, as well as hanging off everything else in the room.

The Flora-Bama Bar is most famous for its annual mullet toss. I’m not going to try to explain it to you, but my friend tells me there is not a bare spot on the beach to stick your toe on mullet toss weekend.

But there’s more to the Flora-Bama than the bar and the package store. There are a number of other bars and restaurants all around with the Flora-Bama brand and all of them are pouring money into the pockets of that guy who bought the land and built the package store.

My friend likes the Flora-Bama Yacht Club best of what’s available, so that’s where we started our Flora-Bama tour. It really was a nice place to put your feet in the sand and enjoy a cold one of some sort. I had one of their signature drinks called a Bushwacker. They won’t tell you what’s in it, they say, “think of it as an adult milkshake.” It was interesting, but my drinking is either wine or margaritas, so I’m not the one to ask.

After our Bushwackers we strolled across the street and made our way around and through the original bar. I can tell I’m getting old, because I had no desire to be there for the mullet toss and I agreed with my friend that the Yacht Club was more our style.

The next morning we hung out a while, having breakfast and taking a dip in their pool. Then we headed for the next portion of our vacation. Come back next week and we’ll go to Navarre Beach.

ART, Attractions, DESTINATIONS, Museums, Performing Arts, Road Trips, TRAVEL, United States

Off Into the Blue with the Angels

Jane Sadek

Making Memories: Let’s Go Fast!

The Blue Angels are the ace performance team of the Navy’s pilots. They call Pensacola home and Pensacola is proud to claim them. We got the insiders version of their Wednesday morning practice run. Come along for the fun!

Soaring with the Blue Angels

My friend lives about 10 minutes from the air base where the Blue Angels fly, but she never gets tired of watching them. When I told her we were coming, she immediately suggested we go. I was concerned she was tired of seeing them, because everyone who visits must want to go. I had the same situation living close to Hearst Castle, but whereas I got very tired of seeing the same thing over and over again, my friend relishes the opportunity to spend a morning with the Blue Angels and she knows all the tricks.

She got us there in time to get a front row seat. We perched on the edge of the runway and enjoyed the antics of the volunteers as they provided pre-show entertainment. They probably wouldn’t call it that, but they’re so excited about their angels and have so much good information that waiting for the show is no burden. We did take turns going to the souvenir shop and viewing the many planes on display around the air field, but nothing was as entertaining as the volunteer in our section as she shared with us what to expect and how to watch her angels.

Then the jets took off, but there is no describing the show. You are so close to the jets. They make such a roar. The pilots do such amazing things you’d think the jets were merely toys in the hands of a playful god, but these are human beings driving humongous vehicles through the sky and they seem to come within a hair’s breadth of one another time and time again. We were awestruck from beginning to end.

Naval Air Museum

As if we hadn’t been wowed enough, after the show my friend ushered us into Naval Air Museum. A year before we’d spent a whole day at The Museum of Flight and in some ways it was more spectacular, but in comparison, the Naval Air Museum is no less interesting. We wandered through the space awestruck, looking at the wide variety of airplanes and jets. I was particularly interested in some displays they had concerning the training Navy pilots undergo. It’s not a job for the light of heart.

As interesting as it was, we finally had to give in to our growling stomachs. We’d had a nice breakfast spread at my friend’s home, but sitting out in the sun, enduring the power and excitement of the show and then wandering around the museum had used up all our calories. We made our way to the nearest Mickey D’s where I got a milkshake I’d been craving for days. The others celebrated their lack of aversion to gluten and ate Big Macs. Ah, I remember Big Macs.

There was more sightseeing to come, but join us next week for our tour of Pensacola and the Flora-Bama!

DESTINATIONS, Restaurants & Bars, Road Trips, TRAVEL, United States

Florida Bound!

Jane Sadek

MEMORY MAKING: LET’S GET BEACHY

This vacation had two compelling reasons. The first, the longstanding promise to visit friends in the Pensacola area and the second, $1200 in airfare from Southwest. Come along and enjoy this trip to Florida!

Welcome to P-Cola

When you get bumped from a flight and the airline hands you a voucher for $1200, you figure out before you get home where you’re going with it. We’d been promising Ken & Iliana for years that we’d visit them in the Pensacola area, but something always seemed to get in our way. There were no excuses now and Bill told me to book it.

There was a another factor. While I’m not all that crazy about the beach, Bill loves it. He muses of a beach place we could make ours. He’d been suggesting the Destin area to me for awhile, but I was not sold.

In fact, I’d researched a Florida vacation back in 2022 and ended up at Club Med’s Sandpiper Bay instead of Destin. Destin just seemed like a crowded mess to me and so I sold him the all-inclusive resort based on the fun we’d had at Club Med Punta Cana a few years before.

It was on the trip to Sandpiper Bay that we decided to sell our real estate photography, because there was really no vacation to it. We’d just managed the business from a different location. Still, we did enough at Sandpiper Bay to know it wasn’t going to be our beachy place. Destin was still on the table and I still thought it was a crowded mess.

So, I sold him another vacation package – time with our friends on Lost Perdido Key and then some time on our own at Navarre Beach, because it is right around the corner from Destin and not so expensive. SOLD! Soon, the flight attendant was announcing we were landing in P-Cola! Yippee!!

Thrifty Isn’t Nifty at PNS

Bill thinks I don’t know how to get the best deal on a rental car and that’s fine with me, because that means he books them. He was quite proud of the great deal he found with Thrifty for this trip. At least he was until he got to the airport and discovered Thrifty did not have a desk in the airport or a shuttle from the airport. His great deal made us find an Uber to get to their remote location and our driver was Mr. Chatty Cathy. Having run into this hitch, which was his fault and was costing us money, Mr. Bill was not in the mood for Mr. Chatty Cathy. After basically telling Mr. CC to shut up, it was a bit of a tense drive for the rest of the drive.

However, we did get a decent car and Bill convinced them to let him return the car to the airport rather than the remote site, so it as a mere hiccup along the road to a fun time. Getting to Lost Perdido Key was a little tricky, but soon I was hugging my great friend and having an aperitif on her condo’s patio. No complaints here.

Lost Perdido Key Beach Club for Drinks & Coastal for Dinner

Moss never grows around my feet when I am with Iliana. We’d barely caught our breath from our travels when she loaded us into the car and took us to her Beach Club. After a drink there, she loaded us up in the car again and we went to dinner up the road. Coastal at Orange Beach was a beautiful restaurant. The food was great and the service, too.

We had plans to see the Blue Angels the next morning and you are going to love that, so join me next week.